enriched by England to enable it to cast off its dependence at a period when the left shore was still remaining a portion of that vast wilderness well known in North America by the appellation of " the far West."

As through a brilliant but intensely cold air we glided rapidly between these two shores, the perpendicular banks of which (from four to eight feet high) were so near to us that we could easily have hailed people on either side, we passed Grand Island, which belongs to the Americans; and then hurrying by a lovely wooded spot belonging to the British, called Navy Island, we suddenly, on rounding a point of land, saw from the very middle of the river before us, a mysterious-looking white mist, rising towards the dark blue sky which serenely reined above it.

My heart felt sick the instant I beheld this mist; and I am quite sure that if I had not known what it was, and had not listened to a strange voice of admonition which for some time I had observed to be rumbling through the air, I should have obeyed the instinctive feeling which, though I cannot describe it, earnestly warned me to "get ashore!" Indeed Nature has beneficently implanted this feeling in the hearts even of beasts, a curious instance of which occurred a few years ago.

Some people in the neighbourhood, who in their composition had rather more curiosity than mercy, subscribed a sum of money for the purpose of sending a vessel full of living animals over their watery

precipice into a watery grave. As soon, however, as this unpiloted vessel reached the vicinity at which I had arrived, the sagacious bear, on seeing the mist, felt exactly what I felt, namely, that there was danger ahead, and accordingly he jumped overboard; and diagonally hurried down by the current, with great difficulty he reached the little island flourishing on the brink of the grave before him. The other animals made similar attempts, but in vain; and thus, on the vessel reaching the cataract, the only living beings that remained on board, and who, therefore, must have been devoid of the instinctive feelings which had ejected the rest, were those who, having been gifted with wings, had no need of it, namely, geese; but their brother biped, man, had cut their pinions; and as they had no intuitive disposition to escape, and could not fly away, they met the doom which had so unkindly been prepared for them. Several were killed; and although a few, by fluttering, preserved their lives, they were almost immediately killed for the sake of their feathers, which were sold to the human species as curiosities.

"Put me ashore, if you please," I said to my pilot, as soon as I saw this mist; but the faithful fellow knew that, without any danger, he could carry me a little farther, and so, much against my will, I proceeded to a spot somewhat lower down, where, with very considerable alacrity, I landed on the shore, which was about six feet above the water; and the boat then veering round with her stern

towards the mist, was soon drawn high and dry on the beach.

It was in the depth of winter, near midnight, and pitch dark, when, following the footsteps of a trusty guide, I traversed the dry, crisp, deep snow, until I came to a few rugged steps which I could only very slowly descend. "A little this way!" muttered my guide, as for some seconds I was lingering on a spot from which my other foot, after fumbling in vain, could feel no landing-place at all. At last, after blundering for a short distance among trees, and over snow-covered obstacles of various shapes, I arrived on a flat surface, which I immediately felt to be glare ice, and along which, my conductor leading me by his hard hand very slowly, we cautiously proceeded, until in a low voice he announced to me that I had reached the point to which I had directed him to conduct me-the table rock of Niagara.

had

I could see nothing, and for that very reason I come; for in the various visits which at different seasons of the year I had made to this spot, I had felt so confused with what I saw and heard-my attention had been so distracted sometimes by one organ, and sometimes by another-sometimes by "Oh look!' and sometimes by "Oh listen!

that I had resolved I would try and meet my enemies one at a time; and even this I found to be almost more than my senses could endure.

But although I could see nothing, yet I felt and heard a great deal.

My first sensation was, that the "dreadful sound of waters in mine ears was a substantial danger; that I was an actor in, and actually in the midst of what, as a passing stranger, I had come merely to contemplate. The cold thick vapour that arose from the cauldron immediately beneath me partaking of eddies in the atmosphere, created also by what was passing below, ascending and descending, rushed sometimes downwards upon me from behind as if it had determined to drive me into the abyss; then it quietly enveloped me, as if its object were to freeze me to death; then suddenly it would puff full in my face, and then whirl round me as if to invite me to join in its eccentric dance.

But while my eyebrows, eyelashes and hair were heavily laden with this condensed vapour, that had rested upon them like flour on the head of a miller, from the same cause my attention was constantly arrested by loud crashes of falling ice from the boughs of the trees behind me, which thus occasionally ridded themselves of the enormous masses which, from the congelation of this vapour, were constantly settling upon them.

Yet, although the sensations and noises I have described were quite sufficient to engross my attention, it was of course mainly attracted by the confused roar and boiling of the great cataract, whose everlasting outline, though veiled by darkness, was immediately before me.

For a considerable time I listened with the feelings of confusion I had so often before experienced;

M

but as I became gradually accustomed to the cold whirling vapour that surrounded me, as well as to the sudden crashing noises behind me, I felt myself by degrees enabled—at first imperfectly, and then distinctly-to analyze and separate from each other the various notes of the two different instruments of which the roar of Niagara is composed-namely, the deep thundering tone of the fall of more than a hundred millions of tons of water per hour over a precipice of 150 feet; and the raging, hissing, lashing, and boiling of all this broken water in the confined cauldron beneath.

The more I studied this language the more clearly I understood it, until, in the ever-changing but unceasing thunder of its eloquence I could always trace, in different proportions, and often apparently in different places, the presence of these two voices in

concert.

Sometimes the stunning, deafening noise proceeding from three thousand six hundred millions* of cubic feet per hour of an element of the same specific gravity as oak, suddenly falling from 150 feet, would apparently so completely overpower every other, that I felt I could point in the dark precisely to the bottom of the cataract; at other times nothing beneath was heard but the raging of broken water, while the thunder that created it was resounding high over head, and sometimes apparently far away, as if a heavy battering-train of artillery were trotting through the forest over a paved road.

* A ton of water contains thirty-six cubic feet.